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The American Bar Association Stifles Legal Education

In Academia, American History, Arts & Letters, Economics, History, Law, Law School on June 28, 2017 at 6:45 am

This piece originally appeared here at the Library of Law and Liberty.

The Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications is a nonprofit accrediting agency for journalism programs. Bradley Hamm, the dean at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, has called the council’s accreditation-review process “flawed,” “superficial,” “extremely time-consuming,” and “sort of a low bar.”

So he’s gotten out. Northwestern University has effectively terminated its relationship with the council, calmly embracing its new status as unaccredited.

The online journal Inside Higher Ed, which points out that the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has done the same, quotes Dean Hamm as saying that, “as we near the 2020s, we expect far better than a 1990s-era accreditation organization that resists change—especially as education and careers in our field evolve rapidly.”

This is a tremendous blow—when two of the most prominent and celebrated journalism programs in the country refuse to acknowledge the authority and legitimacy of an accreditor, it’s tough for the accreditor to argue that the resistant institutions are merely upset about their ability to maintain accreditation. If other journalism schools are frustrated with the council’s obsolete standards, and its tendency to micromanage curricula, more of them will likely follow the example of Northwestern and Berkeley.

The social and financial costs of burdensome accreditation standards and procedures are even more pronounced in the field of law. Small businesses and Americans of modest income struggle to afford the high costs of hiring an attorney or litigating a case. Access to justice or quality representation is a constant concern within the legal profession.

Meanwhile, the American Bar Association, which remains the only accrediting body for law schools in the United States, regulates legal education in a way that drives up costs for law students, and for the consumers onto whom those costs are eventually projected.

The ABA restricts innovation by fixing the number of credit hours necessary for law students to graduate, effectively eliminating the possibility of a shorter program than the standard three years. It discourages law professors from honing their practical skills by narrowing the designation of “full-time” faculty to exclude those who maintain an ongoing remunerative relationship with a law firm or business. Its requirements regarding equipment and technology mean, in practice, that many schools are buying expensive computers and furnishing computer labs that students may never use.

ABA scrutiny of attrition rates has also contributed to a change in law-school culture and practices. There was a time when law schools could accept a high percentage of applicants who, as students, had to prove their competence in the classroom and stand or fall on their academic merit. Those who couldn’t cut it flunked out. They didn’t incur three years of debt only to take and retake a bar exam they weren’t equipped to pass.

The ABA position penalizing schools for high attrition—the result of a new interpretation of Standard 501(b) that prohibits law schools from admitting applicants who aren’t “capable” of completing a Juris Doctor or passing a bar exam—now arguably causes law schools to seek to retain students who can’t cut it. To that end, it encourages grade inflation and heavier use of student loans.

Law schools recently came under criticism for hiring their own graduates as a way to boost their post-graduation employment statistics. In response, the ABA instituted procedures to prevent the spread of misleading data. What seemed like a good-faith effort to enhance transparency and accountability has led, instead, to flawed incentives. Law schools have taken to promoting “JD-required” and “bar-passage-required” jobs to their graduates more strongly than corporate or financial positions that pay higher salaries but don’t require either a law license or bar membership.

If you graduated from law school today and became the CEO of a large, multinational company tomorrow, you would skew your school’s data in an unfavorable direction.

This changed emphasis neglects the realities of a marketplace in which the availability of traditional law jobs remains stagnant. To best serve their students, law schools should feel free to guide them toward alternative careers based in new technologies and businesses that would benefit from the knowledge and leadership that legal education supplies.

The ABA’s ministrations also help drive up the price of legal education, forcing law schools to direct time and resources toward ABA compliance that could be put toward student scholarships or improving the curriculum. And a higher price tag means that members of the legal profession, and young lawyers in particular, in order to pay debts or compensate for opportunity costs incurred during law school, pass these costs on to consumers in the form of higher legal fees.

The bottom line is that, when a substantial portion of the population cannot afford to hire an attorney, or at least feels that way, the legal system has failed in its chief purpose: to ensure that wrongs are righted and justice is served.

Unintended harm, however, is nothing new for the ABA.

Founded in 1878 by “leading” or “representative” lawyers who were selected by an elite group of men from states along the East Coast, the ABA sought to nationalize professional and ethical standards with these goals: “to advance the science of jurisprudence, promote the administration of justice and uniformity of legislation throughout the Union, uphold the honor of the profession of the law, and encourage cordial intercourse among the members.”[1]

Noble ambitions indeed. But the organization soon became a fraternal guild that sought to enforce rigid barriers to entry into the legal profession with the assistance of independent bar associations in the 50 states. “For many years,” explained legal scholar Philip J. Wickser in the 1920s, “the Association fought hard to retain its selective quality, and not to forget that a relatively small homogenous group could get the most done.”[2]

The ABA officially excluded African Americans for 66 years, according to Susan D. Carle in her 2013 book Defining the Struggle. Its ouster of three African Americans in 1912 on the basis of their skin color drew protests from the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. That same year, the ABA issued a resolution stating that “it has never been contemplated that members of the colored race should become members of this Association.”[3]

Although the ABA has since sought to make up for its racist past by increasing the ethnic diversity of its membership, creating a commission on sexual orientation and gender identity, and strengthening its rules prohibiting racial harassment or discrimination, part of its purpose historically has been to regulate entry into the profession and decrease the number of low-income, immigrant, and minority lawyers[4] (though in recent decades such decreases have been a consequence, not the purpose, of ABA regulation).

No matter how hard the ABA attempts to distance itself from its origins, it cannot escape the fact that its function is to exclude certain groups from membership to enable a monopoly on legal services by its members. Such exclusion has tended to fall along racial lines. One law professor has thus complained that “all of the ABA’s diversity efforts ring hollow” because the ABA “caused blacks to be excluded from the profession in the first place.”[5]

Given its racially charged beginnings and racially dividing regulations and standards, it’s surprising that the ABA is still considering revising Standard 316, which addresses the bar-passage rates of law-school graduates. Compliance with the revised standard would require bar passage by 75 percent of the graduates of a currently approved (as opposed to provisionally approved) law school in at least three of the last five years.[6]

A few months ago, Lawrence P. Nolan, the president of the State Bar of Michigan, penned a letter to ABA delegates to point out, among other things, that minority organizations—and even the ABA Council for Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Educational Pipeline—were against the proposed revision to Standard 316. “The collective judgment of those committed to [reducing] the . . . racial disparity in the legal profession,” he said, “is reflected in their unanimous opposition to this amendment.”

Nolan also stated that the ABA’s own data “confirms the large gap for African-American bar passage rates, which are lower than overall rates, particularly on the multiple-choice test.” Statistics cited by Nolan show that African Americans pass the bar exam at a lower rate than whites and that the percentage of white repeat takers of the bar exam is 3.2 percent whereas the figure for black repeat takers is 14.1 percent. If those statistics are accurate and predictive, then the effects of the revised standard would fall disproportionately on those schools with higher numbers of African American students.

Supporters of the proposed revision portray law schools as exploiters of racial minorities that have been admitting underqualified applicants to make up for diminishing admissions applications. There’s truth to this characterization. Law-school admissions standards have dropped precipitously as enrollment has declined.

But why trust the organization that caused or at least exacerbated many of these problems to fix them? We need imagination and rational risk to move forward constructively and creatively. Proposals as wide-ranging as abolishing the bar exam or developing non-JD curricula in law schools ought to be seriously considered. Another idea would be to strip the ABA of its accrediting powers altogether, something the U.S. Department of Education might consider.

During this moment of social unrest, when rancorous partisanship seems to permeate all fields of discourse, faculty and administration all along the political spectrum can agree on one thing: The ABA is systematically harming ethnic minorities and becoming as obsolete as its counterpart in journalism education.

It may well be time for top-ranked law schools to follow in the footsteps of the J-schools at Northwestern and Berkeley. Only if several leading law schools joined to seek an end to the ABA’s accrediting function would this reform stand a chance. Law schools with lower rankings may lack the credibility to resist, given their stake in the accreditation process. Their administrators already, in my view, avoid speaking out against the ABA due to their reasonable fear of retaliation. (My own trepidation almost prevented this piece from reaching print.)

Granted, it might give the law schools pause that in most states, admission to the bar (by authority of the state bar or the state supreme court) is conditioned on holding a degree from an ABA-accredited law school. Still, the journalism-school revolt demonstrates that a mass rebuff of the ABA’s accrediting legitimacy is neither extreme nor absurd. Prominent law schools are already experimenting in other areas, such as considering GRE scores (rather than just LSAT scores) for admissions purposes. Such experimentation is all to the good.

The legal profession is, in the words of Benjamin Barton, “facing a major retrenchment” and remains mired in outmoded tasks that artificial intelligence may replace. It’s stuck in a bygone period when lawyers felt threatened by entrepreneurial upstarts who breached longstanding protocols such as prohibitions on advertising or contingency fees. It’s time for an energetic rethinking of the goals and purpose of legal education and the legal profession.

Ending ABA accreditation authority would be an exciting first step. It would enable administrators to reallocate resources to lower the costs of legal education and, consequently, of legal services. And it would allow them to focus on their true mission: not lining the pockets of accreditation agencies and bureaucratic guilds but educating prospective lawyers and bringing justice and order to rich and poor alike.

The views expressed herein are solely the author’s, and do not reflect those of Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law or its Blackstone and Burke Center.

 

[1] Simeon E. Baldwin, “The Founding of the American Bar Association,” The American Bar Association Journal 3 (1917), 659-62, 695.

[2] Philip J. Wickser, “Bar Associations,” Cornell Law Quarterly 15 (1929-30), 398.

[3] Susan D. Carle, Defining the Struggle: National Organizing for Racial Justice, 1880-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 281-82, and 541-43.

[4] Jerold S. Auerbach, Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 65: “During the second decade of the twentieth century the American Bar Association began to assert itself aggressively as a professional protective organization. Its purpose was twofold: to preserve its own exclusiveness (and the status that accompanied its preservation) and to exert professional leverage upon the political process.” For admission of minorities, see Auerbach, pp. 65-66, 71, 107, 131, 159-60, 200, 216, and 295.

[5] George B. Shepherd, “No African-American Lawyers Allowed: The Inefficient Racism of the ABA’s Accreditation of Law Schools,” Journal of Legal Education 53 (2003), 104.

[6] The ABA Council and the Accreditation Committee of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar operate independently of the ABA pursuant to regulations of the U.S. Department of Education, which recognizes these bodies as authorized accreditors. For ease of reference and understanding, and because of the connection between these accrediting bodies and the ABA, the taxonomy I have adopted simply lumps these bodies together under the heading of “ABA.”

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Part One: Review of Nathaniel Branden Issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies

In America, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Philosophy, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on June 21, 2017 at 6:45 am

This post is the reproduction of portions of a series of pieces originally published at Atlas Society’s website.  The original series of posts is available here, here, here, and here.

The idea for a symposium on the life and thought of Nathaniel Branden came in 2012, two years before Branden’s death. Branden himself knew about and approved of the symposium but never saw it completed before he passed away.

The editorial board of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies conceived of this symposium as a wide-ranging, probing treatment of Branden’s vast and complex career, not just of his years with Ayn Rand. The response from potential contributors exceeded their expectations; they were inundated with submissions. What was supposed to be one volume became two. The once-slender manuscript grew to over 300 pages bearing the title “Nathaniel Branden: His Work and Legacy.”  This is the first such work of its kind to assess Branden as a central figure in both philosophy and applied psychology in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Although the contributors to this collection come from various disciplines and represent different, sometimes incompatible positions, the editors received no contributions from the more “fundamentalist” Objectivists, and none from scholars associated with the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). The editors emphasize this fact in their prologue not to display resentment or animus, it seems, but as a sort of disclaimer—and explanation for the largely positive  tone that characterizes much of the content here.

I have striven for impartiality regarding the Branden-Rand split and have, I think, made a good-faith effort to maintain the critical detachment necessary to write searchingly and decisively about this collection without sacrificing scholarly rigor or causing needless offense to students of Branden or Rand.

Section I

Section I of the collection is devoted to the so-called “Rand Years” of Branden’s career. It contains essays by Duncan Scott and Susan Love Brown and the reproduction of a lecture and question-answer session by Branden himself.

Scott, a filmmaker, tells the “truly epic story” of the improbable rise of the Objectivist movement that is attributable in part to Branden’s efforts. Scott met Branden but did not know him well. Filming Branden in 2003 for the Objectivist History Project, however, led him to realize Branden’s seminal role in the proliferation of Objectivism.

Scott credits Branden with popularizing Rand’s work and institutionalizing her lecture series. “The creation of a philosophy and the creation of a philosophical movement,” he says, “are not one and the same.” Undoubtedly Rand achieved the former on her own, but Branden is largely responsible for the latter, having responded to Rand’s fan mail, planned her events, established a newsletter in her honor, and spread her message across the globe to eager students and curious minds. These labors not only increased Rand’s following, but also lifted her spirits. Discouraged by negative reviews of her work, she began, with Branden’s help, to realize the extent of the impact her novels were having.

Branden popularized Rand as a writer of nonfiction and encouraged her to write about “racism as biological collectivism, totally incompatible with individualist philosophy”—a position that drew needed attention during the height of the Civil Rights Era. Scott succeeds in showing that Branden’s singular devotion to Rand during this period made him something of a publicist for, not just a disciple of, her work. He created vehicles for driving her ideas to vast audiences and made possible the formation of groups devoted to her philosophy. Without him, Rand may not have become the towering figure she is today.

Because it is so titillating and provocative, Brown’s piece on Branden’s sexuality is the most memorable part of the opening section of“Nathaniel Branden: His Work and Legacy,” recently published by The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.

Even its title—“Nathaniel Branden’s Oedipus Complex”—invites controversy. Although Branden was a psychologist, or perhaps because he was one, Brown’s invocation of Freud seems both fitting and surprising. Freud, like Branden and Rand, was educated in philosophy. But Freud’s oedipal theories remain divisive and contested, not to mention opposed by both Branden and Rand. At least since Richard Webster’s publication of Why Freud Was Wrong in 1995, and probably much earlier, consensus among psychologists has held that Freud’s theories, many of them anyway, have been discredited. Yet Brown gives them full and unequivocal expression in her treatment of Branden.

Having left behind the phallic stage, transfixed by an unconscious castration anxiety, aroused by his loving mother and threatened by her loyal closeness to his father, the sexualized developing male child, in Freud’s paradigm, represses his feelings towards his mother or transfers them onto another female, one who is more appropriate for pursuit. When he reaches puberty, his excited feelings for his mother are reanimated; if left unresolved, they can cause eventual adult neurosis, the fading memory of the unattainable, ideal young mother serving as the inescapable fixation that blurs perceptions of reality. The thematic suggestions of this Freudian scheme characterize Brown’s curious approach to Branden.    

That Branden would describe his mother affectionately in his memoir should come as no surprise. Absent any evidence of abuse or neglect, most adult males probably have articulated love for, and devotion to, their mothers. Whether these feelings amount to oedipal sexual attraction in the Freudian sense is open to debate. Branden was a psychologist and so wrote with a vocabulary specific to his discipline. “One consequence of my repression,” he said, “was that sometimes I failed to see that girls I liked returned my feelings.” Brown picks up on the word “repression,” hypothesizing about Branden’s “unresolved feelings about his mother” that implicated “his feelings toward his father.” Either Brown is on to something, or she overreads and overstates what was merely the retelling of an ordinary adolescent incident with no symbolic significance. The value of Brown’s analysis on this score is only as valuable as Freud’s theories are credible.  

Branden moved out of his parents’ house when he graduated high school, as is customary for young adults of that age. Brown sees in this natural transition the carnal workings of an oedipal force that explains, in part, his budding relationship with Barbara Weidman, who became his first wife. Brown claims that, through Barbara, Branden “insinuat[ed] himself into a surrogate family and, out of that, tr[ied] to construct an ideal family within which he could at last resolve his Oedipal complex.” It so happened that Branden read The Fountainhead during this time of alleged psycho-sexual fantasy and stimulation, and Brown attributes his interest in the novel, not to his own agency, will, intelligence, or curiosity, but to instinctual sexual fixations that were mostly out of his control and subject to random events and chance relationships, such as the one with Rand and her husband, Frank O’Connor.

Brown’s theorizing about Branden’s “genital stage” (a Freudian term she avoids) raises compelling questions: were Rand and O’Connor—who were around the age of Branden’s parents—surrogates for Branden’s natal family on whom he could project his sexual energies? Did Branden’s relationship with Barbara reenact the power plays between his own father and mother? Did Branden attempt to push away O’Connor as a male child in the phallic stage struggles through his rivalry with his father? Was Rand’s dedication of Atlas Shrugged to both Branden and O’Connor a signal that Branden had achieved sexual equality with Rand while supplanting O’Connor as Rand’s romantic interest?  

Brown suggests that, through his affair with Rand, “Branden had effectively slept with his ‘mother’ and vanquished his ‘father.’” These and other stimulating conclusions demonstrate how Brown provides a unique and intriguing perspective even if her psychological hypotheses are ultimately untestable and thus unprovable. Rand’s admirers may take issue with Brown’s portrayal of Rand as increasingly needy and dependent on Branden’s affections as he grew apart from her. They may not like the effort to superimpose Freudian paradigms on complicated human experiences from long ago. But they cannot deny the magnetism of Brown’s analysis.

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Session Eight: Richard Bulliet on the History of the World

In Arts & Letters, Eastern Civilizaton, Historicism, History, Humanities, liberal arts, Philosophy, Western Civilization on June 14, 2017 at 6:45 am

Here, in the eighth lecture of his course, The History of the World, Richard Bulliet discusses Greece and Iran (1000-30 B.C.E./ India, 1500 B.C.E.-550 C.E. Part I).

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What Is the Rule of Law, Anyway?

In America, Civics, Economics, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Libertarianism, Philosophy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on June 7, 2017 at 6:45 am

This piece originally appeared here in The Intercollegiate Review.

“Donald Trump Could Threaten U.S. Rule of Law, Scholars Say.” So declared an ominous headline in the New York Times roughly one year ago. MSNBC likewise ran a suggestive interview in January entitled, “Will the ‘rule of law’ survive under Trump?”

Such alarming commentary presupposes the existence of the rule of law in the United States and appears designed to portray Donald Trump as a threat to that rule. In March, however, Reason republished and retitled a curious piece that first appeared in The Week: “The Immoral ‘Rule of Law’ Behind Trump’s Deportation Regime.” The implication of this revised title (the original read, “How today’s pro-immigrant activists are adopting the tactics of abolitionists”) is that Trump is staunchly committed, rather than antagonistic, to the rule of law.

So which is it? Does Trump jeopardize or safeguard the rule of law?

The answer, if we assume the rule of law is in full force and effect in the United States, is probably situational: In some cases, Trump undermines the rule of law, while in others he reinforces it. But to know for sure, and to appreciate the difference, one must first understand what the rule of law is.

The rule of law encompasses multiple legal principles, chief among them is that the rules that govern society apply equally to all individuals within the prescribed jurisdiction. No person, not even the king or the president, is above the law. Law, not the arbitrary commands or categorical dictates of human rulers, is supreme.

Thus, the opposite of the “rule of law” is the “rule of man,” or the idea that the formal, discretionary imperatives of a powerful sovereign necessarily bind his subjects and subordinates.

The rule of law is a philosophical concept and a liberal ideal that gained ascendency during the Enlightenment (think Locke and Montesquieu) but that can be traced to antiquity (think Aristotle). The British jurist Albert Venn Dicey listed as its prime characteristics:

  1. “the absolute supremacy or predominance of regular law as opposed to the influence of arbitrary power”;
  2. “equality before the law, or the equal subjection of all classes to the ordinary law of the land administered by the ordinary Law Courts”; and
  3. “a formula for expressing the fact that with us the law of the constitution, the rules which in foreign countries naturally form part of a constitutional code, are not the source but the consequence of the rights of individuals, as defined and enforced by the Courts.”

These suggest that the rule of law is a bottom-up rather than a top-down system of governmental ordering based on already enunciated and widely accepted precepts. The operative rules that regulate the normative order of human activity in a free society under the law are rooted in custom and tradition. A ruler or judge is, in such a happy jurisdiction, responsive to the controlling principles that are antecedent to his or her political election, appointment, or empowerment.

F. A. Hayek identified the rule of law as a defining attribute of the common-law system, which, in his view, stood in contradistinction to the civil-law system that instituted vast codes and complex administrative agencies to superintend the unvigilant populace. Legislatures, of course, are accountable to the people through elections; thus, their enactments must reflect extant social practices and beliefs to satisfy voters. Administrative agencies, with their extensive rulemaking powers, are not so accountable. They are by design removed from legislative procedures and thus isolated from voters.

Hayek saw the common law as a decentralized form of social organization, and civil law as centralized planning and design. The rule of law, he thought, inhered in the former system but not in the latter. “The possession of even the most perfectly drawn-up legal code does not, of course, insure that certainty which the rule of law demands,” he warned, “and it therefore provides no substitute for a deeply rooted tradition,” which the common law embodied.

The rule of law encapsulates other seminal concepts as well: the predictability, consistency, reliability, neutrality, and clarity of working rules, for instance. These, however, are in some way derived from the principal teaching that, in Hayek’s words, “all rules apply equally to all, including those who govern.” By any appreciable standard, the United States has not lived up to this high ideal in light of the growth of sovereign immunity and qualified immunity for government officials, the disparate treatment of individuals based on their political power and connections, and, among others, the rapid rise of the administrative state.

Lately the rule of law has become associated with a law-and-order mentality that emphasizes punishment, severity, and rigidity as touchstones of the legal system. The rule of law, on this view, is the instantiation of brute force or the execution of raw power, or perhaps an ideological construct meant to condition the populace into servile submission to government authority.

This understanding of the rule of law has some merit: John Hasnas’s article “The Myth of the Rule of Law” explains how rule-of-law rhetoric indoctrinates people into casual acceptance of the harmful government monopoly on the institutions of law. He decries the gradual acquiescence of ordinary people to, in his words, “the steady erosion of their fundamental freedoms” in the name of the rule of law.

But the rule of law as an ideal, rather than a felt reality, aims to preserve rather than imperil fundamental freedoms. Perhaps there are those with ulterior motives who champion the rule of law to achieve concealed goals; perhaps government in its current form cannot actualize rule-of-law ideals. When rule-of-law discourse does serve the repressive function that Hasnas describes, it is unduly coercive and abusive. In its proper form, and as it was originally understood, however, the rule of law aspired to restrain government power.

In the minds of yesteryear patriots like Thomas Paine, the United States epitomized the rule of law. He averred that “in America the law is king,” whereas “in absolute governments the king is law.” He said, as well, that “in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

If the law is no longer king in America, it’s not because of Trump. That he enjoys immense and immeasurable power is evidence of the extent of the decline of the rule of law in this country.

Having flouted and subverted the rule of law for decades, the radical elements of the progressive left in the United States now face the inevitable consequence of their concerted activity—namely, that their coercive methods and institutions may be turned against them, and the authoritarian structures they created may service policies at odds with their own.

We can all learn a lesson from this revealing irony.